ABSTRACT
We address the political and intellectual process within which Mário Pinto de Andrade developed a research project around the Kimbundu language. Having learned the language of the Ambundu ethnolinguistic group while still a child in Luanda, he emigrated to Lisbon to study classical philology at the university. There he was crossed by racial and geographic markers that reconfigured his interests in African linguistics. Using the tools, knowledge, and collections he had access to in Lisbon, Andrade wrote an essay on Kimbundu published in Luanda, combining a critical genealogy of grammars and dictionaries published since the seventeenth century on the subject from an anti-colonial perspective. As we showed, this movement of encounter with the issues that crossed him was carried out in the metropolis, but the results were disseminated in his home country, in tune with the Movement of the New Intellectuals of Angola.
Keywords:
Intellectuals; Angola; Anticolonialism; Kimbundu; Salazarism; Assimilation